Gandhi and Pluto revisited

I was remiss in not mentioning my respect for the Buddhist monks who just completed their 2300 mile walk (yes, walk) from Texas to Washington DC. Their "Walk for Peace" began in October from their temple in Fort Worth on October 26th, finishing in DC yesterday. While short, here is a link with some basic info and reactions to their journey.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/11/monks-celebrate-end-walk-for-peace-lincoln-memorial/88624584007/ 

While I can't say that I followed their trek daily, I did get updates from Nora. Such an inspiring effort by men who have made a commitment to their beliefs, but more importantly, try to live as those beliefs teach them. Such dedication and self sacrifice makes the raucous debate over Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl halftime show seem as trivial and petty as so much of the vitriol that is rampant in America today.

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I have altered my approach to updating my posts into a more readable (OK, a larger font) format. I am now systematically opening every post from newest to oldest and updating those which need the process. Fortunately, I began using the larger font in 2021, so last week I started accessing each entry beginning in December 2020. So far I have worked my way from 2020 through 2015, which leaves me with five years to go.

Today I updated a post called Gandhi and Pluto, from July 2015, and thought it appropriate to reprint it along with my reference to the monks walk. So, rather than a link, here is the post.

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The July edition of National Geographic has, among others, two articles I found very interesting.  One concerns the legacy of Gandhi's teachings in India today, the other the long awaited fly by of Pluto by the New Horizon spaceship.

I am not sure if the connection that occurred in my mind between the two articles would have happened had I not read them consecutively, but a connection nevertheless sprang to me as I walking the dog today.

Is it possible that other forms of life in the universe will only be discovered when mankind begins treating the forms of life on earth with respect and equality?

The Gandhi article recounted what many consider his penultimate action, the 1930 Salt March.  For those of you unfamiliar with this event, at the time, there was a tax on salt production, proceeds of that tax going to the coffers of Britain, as India was still part of its empire.  Gandhi's decision, in retrospect, to stage this march to the sea where he would illegally (not pay the tax) produce salt, is genius, but was not universally supported by those advocating for Indian independence.  As is so often the case with leaders who talk the talk but do not walk the walk, Gandhi understood that the way to reach the common people was to relate the need for freedom to their lives.  As Gandhi said, other than water and air, salt was the commodity most required by Indians considering the extremely hot weather of the country.  Noble concepts were one thing, salt was a part of everyday life.

What is so amazing about Gandhi was that his focus on salt, so basic yet so powerful, was just a part of his message.  During his walk, he stopped at some of the poorest villages in the area, and went out of his way to challenge the caste system by inviting the "untouchables", not only to be part of the walk, but as a symbol to those Indians who supported the caste system that they might understand that the meaning of freedom was not just freedom from British rule, but freedom from poverty and social injustice for all Indians.  To further that ideal, he encouraged spinning of cloth, not just, again, as a protest against Britain, but to encourage everyone to wear khadi, to look the same, as an analogy to his hope that by looking the same, everyone, high born or low, might be treated with similar fairness.

The thought that started the connection to Pluto, was Gandhi's belief that religions are not for separating men from one another, but to bind them.  He revered Jesus, could quote verses from the Bible and Koran, and was a devout Hindu, but he also knew that true  independence needed to be founded on a democracy based on laws not religions. Considering the misguided attempts by fundamentalists in many corners of the planet to fashion their governments from specific tracts of their religious tomes, Muslim and Christian, it is not surprising that Gandhi's dream is still illusive, both in India and in much of the world.

Perhaps, if we were to judge our religious leaders on their similarity to Gandhi, his lack of material possessions, his time spent among those with the least, his efforts to promote equal treatment of all people, we might find those leaders to be without moral high ground, and it might explain why too many of those leaders advocate messages of blame, isolation and hatred as opposed to unity, community and love.  It is far easier to get rich when your message promotes friction than it is when you advocate for tolerance and peace.

And, perhaps, despite our best efforts to find life in the universe, despite the myriad number of vessels we have cruising through the solar system and beyond, despite the radio and TV signals that even now communicate how we live and how we die, we have not found life outside planet Earth because we haven't learned how to treat life on planet Earth.  

Whether it be the animals that we slaughter for their skin or their bones, the sea creatures we poison via our dumping of trash in the oceans, the birds we kill by belching toxins into the air, or the people we dehumanize because their skin color, gender, age, or any trait that has been deemed different, our lack of love for life on this tiny blue ball spinning anonymously in the cosmos, might be the reason for this lack of success.

There are those who worry what life from afar might do to us, but perhaps they have not come forth because they worry what we would do to them.  Based on what we do to each other, it would not be surprising.

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In June of 2022, I wrote a story called the Universal Guild which concerns that very same premise that I touched upon in the last paragraph of Gandhi and Pluto. The idea that we will never find other life in the universe until we learn how to treat each other on this tiny blue planet we call Earth. Here is a link to that story. 

https://wurdsfromtheburbs.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-universal-guild.html

It is very clear to me as I reread those posts 2010 to 2016, up to 2020, that the exact problems that I discussed, the exact same issues that I wrote letters to my local newspapers about, the exact same topics that were being debated in our country, have not changed.

This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, or a surprise if you were to research the debates that our founders had with each other as they developed the foundations for our country 250 years ago.

What is sad, nay, depressing, is not only the lack of progress, but the depth of the backsliding that has occurred in the years since I established wurdsfromtheburbs.

Are my feelings the result of being more politically aware than before? Perhaps, although I can recall having strong political views as far back as 1980 when trickle down economics under Reagan began the slow deterioration of middle class buying power. 

Certainly, the nature of the news media today with its extreme us vs them message that distorts everyone's opinions, may also be a factor. It is far more difficult to find unbiased news that it was even a decade ago.

But what if the real blame is actual reality? That there really is a decline in progress, and that is not just the normal pendulum swing that sometimes means two steps forward will always be followed by one step back. I would imagine that people who lived towards the end of other great civilizations, Roman or otherwise, may have felt the same foreboding but then may have just as readily chalked it up to the normal cycle of things, not knowing that their uneasiness was true.

Predicting doom is as old as communication between people, written or oral. I would think that since we are all mortal, if would be natural for us to have thoughts that broached our own mortality as well as that of the culture or society as a whole.

Yet it is still true that great civilizations that accomplished magnificent feats of creation, invented incredible mathematics, developed insightful philosophies and explanations of the world, eventually declined, some to be absorbed into the general knowledge base of humanity, some to be lost forever within our known history.

There is no guarantee that the American experiment of governance will last forever, no divine right that our vision will succeed. 

Whether the real truth is that we are one of millions of species in the vast universe, or the one and only sentient life form created as an experiment to see just how close we might come to a Great Awakening, it kind of doesn't matter in the short run, and frankly, as beings whose lifespans rarely exceed 100 years, we are the epitome of the short run.

What does matter is that we take seriously the lessons of the monks who just completed their walk, or of Gandhi, or even the person in our own lives whose example has inspired us to do better, to treat all those we meet as we would want to be treated. And, not just person to person, but nation to nation, and, perhaps, someday, planet to planet.